Bundle together a bunch of stuff into generic fantasy tropes (e.g. a “bard” class)

As they point out, the entire game is fewer words than Volume 1 of 4E. When I say “remove” or “simplify”, I mean it.

Most of it is easily and quickly recognizable as GURPS; the edit job is very good. Anyone with a few games of GURPS under their belt will quickly and easily make sense of it all. The streamlining is also very good, so people who were intimidated by GURPS will have no trouble picking things up.

[Sidebar: I struggled over the term ‘rules-light’. Even in its slimmed-down form, DF has more rules than what usually passes for rules light in the latter half of 2017. That said, compared to GURPS is practically Apocalypse World, so maybe rules-light is the best descriptor.]

A very experienced GURPS group might be doing something like a big custom setting with massive customization. GURPS makes one-shots very difficult. If nothing else just telling everyone the parameters for character creation can take a ton of effort! DF takes all that and lets you do simple exploration/dungeon crawl fantasy games.

Inexperienced gamers in search of more crunch but hesitating to take the plunge into the very heavy game system of GURPS will benefit from the simpler rules, that they can later switch to if it pleases them.

Overall, I like it, but I’m uncertain just how much staying power it has compared to a full-fledged GURPS game. Once you’ve run a few one-shots and leveled up a few characters, what then?

Edited to add: I forgot to mention a couple of points. First, production design and quality are as you’d expect from SJGames: really good. The books have a somewhat minimal style with good (but not great) art. The text is clear and readable, “scannable”, and everything is indexed and easy to find.

Second, the more I think about it, the more I like it. My initial “what then”, the more I think about it, gives way to an organic “sandbox” style of gaming instead of the big, up-front games we’re used to. Maybe that’s good.